Lasica, who lives in Pleasanton, calls it “the grassroots site that started it all,” noting that Ourmedia predated YouTube by a few weeks, and that it beat MySpace into online video as well.

That might be small comfort, when you think of the millions using YouTube and MySpace, and the 130,000 registered users of Ourmedia. (Isn’t it hard to believe something that has achieved household status, like YouTube, is less than two years old?) But Lasica, who bootstrapped the site with his and Canter’s credit cards, is proud of his achievement and ready to revamp the site for further growth.

In an e-mail, Lasica said:

Our core mission is to empower citizen media makers. Citizen journalism is a part of this, but so are a lot of other important genres like digital storytelling (few people were sharing their digital stories online before we came along) and online films.

When we relaunch Ourmedia in about 10-14 days, you’ll see a new site that caters to the creative community — people who want to make higher-quality video in collaborative teams, people doing serious stuff, not just lip-syncing and setting themselves on fire. Frothy, fun video clips are cool, but I sense a hunger in the land for something deeper and more meaningful. That’s what our community is evolving toward.